2.
Company information
National Marketing Resources Darrin Clawson, Chief Information Ofﬁcer
341 W. Washington dclawson@nmrdirect.com
Kearney, MO 64060 (816) 903-6177
National Marketing Resources is a company operating in the consulting and marketing
industries, and offers its various services to entrepreneurs, investors, and small
business owners. They’re a “sister company” to Professional Marketing International,
which operates out of Utah. Together (operations between the two companies are
highly integrated) they employ close to 300 between Kearney, MO; Provo, UT; and a
satellite sales ofﬁce in Phoenix, AZ.
System name and brief description
The information system I will be planning and developing for National Marketing
Resources (“NMR”) has been given the working name Birdie, simply for the reason that
NMR enjoys naming its systems after golf jargon. It is a sales leads tracking system
that computerizes the process of obtaining and categorizing sales leads from various
marketing campaigns and then forwarding them to marketers, who then follow through
on those leads and upgrade their statuses to accounts.
System stakeholders
The owners of the company (Steve Thorne and Boyd Kanenwisher) are both
stakeholders in this project, obviously, as they will get reports with information based
on sales leads statistics. Sales managers are also stakeholders as they and their
marketers will be prime users of this software. The Processing department will also
have a stake in the system as they’re the one processing leads and forwarding them to
the marketers. The system will only be used internally, so there are no external
stakeholders.
Description of existing system
The existing system is known as LINKS. It allows for the importing of sales leads and
the managing of those leads, including forwarding them to marketers and maintaining
the status of those leads.
LINKS only runs on local Windows client workstations. If a user wishes to use the
client software but they don’t have it installed on their workstation, they must ﬁrst have
all the prerequisite software installed (including report viewers, .NET Frameworks, etc).
In the interest of accessing this system from any computer, regardless of operating
system and location, this system can be modiﬁed and written as a web application with
added functionality.

3.
Initial technological assumptions
The new system will be built using the Django web framework, which is built upon
Python. It will use a MySQL database backend. The design will be done using object-
oriented design principles (Django uses object-relational mapping between the Python
code and the SQL database). As Django loosely follows the model-view-controller
pattern, design will be in three layers.
Initially the system will not be integrated with the existing LINKS system. This
functionality could be added later. This project will perform some of the same
functionality as LINKS, while adding others as well, and perhaps most importantly, the
ability to expand to other functions much more easily.
I’m challenging myself some initially with the technology I’ll be using for this project.
I’m already quite familiar with the workings of MySQL, and I’m somewhat familiar with
web frameworks (I’ve done some work with Ruby on Rails before), but this will be the
ﬁrst time I’ve ever used a Python-based web framework. I don’t anticipate many
problems with this, however, as Python compliments Java & C# (languages I’m familiar
with) more than Ruby does.
Initial requirement assumptions
Key business functions are largely tied to the managing of sales leads. Some possible
use cases are:
Deﬁne lead source
•
Import external leads
•
Deﬁne marketing campaign
•
Create new lead
•
Deﬁne market
•
Distribute leads to sales team
•
Upgrade (or downgrade) lead status
•
Archive inactive leads
•
Key domain classes in this project also center around sales leads, the sources of those
leads, the customers they pertain to, as well as the marketers that follow up on their
statuses.
Lead Source Promotion Pipeline
• • •
Sales Company Division Team
• • •
Marketer Lead Product
• • •
Event Order
• •

4.
Development methodology
I’ll be using the Uniﬁed Process as the development methodology for this project.
UML diagrams will be built based on a master list of use cases as well (both
requirements and design models).
Ultimate disposition of project
My sponsor (Darrin Clawson) will be somewhat involved in the project. He and the
chief software architect of the current LINKS system (Michael Battey) will offer
guidance as to the elementary business processes I’ll need to map out. It’s more of a
prototype system based on the idea of a web-based retooling to the existing system.
Our ofﬁce has been incorporating some Macs into daily operations lately, and more
and more associates of the companies are using mobile phones with full-ﬂedged
Internet browsers. They’ll need a way to access functions of the system from their
non-Windows computers, or even their mobile phones. This system should serve as a
prototype of how that system can work, although whether it will be implemented once
the project is completed is doubtful. I have complete control over the system’s abilities
and scope.